That term is very apt. I found this blog post about it, which I think really hits the nail on the head, too:
http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissal...
> Paul Graham, News.YC’s moderator emeritus, says that “The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it’s a cache dump of the writer’s prejudices…” This probably explains why they’re so common. It’s natural to see any news story as confirmation of your existing prejudices—but it’s easy to read confirmation where it’s not there. So it’s easy to see Groupon or Zynga as a “failure” for being worth merely a couple billion dollars when they were once worth ten billion plus apiece. (You could get pretty rich failing like that a few times.)
> But the real driver is not just that it’s easy to misread a story as confirming your beliefs. It’s that the alternative is to read a story and realize you were wrong. And since a middlebrow dismissal is a dismissal of something, it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias.
Be conciencious when dismissing something that’s inconsistent with your world view, seems like very good advice, at least if the source is credible.
For example: when the paper itself says that the cognitive declines seen in people who don’t spend time hospitalized are a small fraction of the magnitude of the cognitive declines seen in hospitalized patients (Figures 2, 3; in some cases a cognitive benefit is seen in mild cases), yet a comment observing that the effects are confined to a small population is dismissed for the reason that “professional medical researchers would have thought of that”.
By the way: as far as I can tell, the paper doesn’t discuss this issue anywhere.
What a compelling, “high brow” response.
I think he overlooked that the people were hospitalized and on ventilators because they had covid.
The point is that if you have a non-ICU covid case, this research is unlikely to apply.
The findings were concerning to anyone who had it, they also mention cases where the cognitive deficit was the first reported symptom.
Why do we have to make up extra rules for everything Covid-19 related?
Is it a symptom of the illness or a symptom of the treatment? If you had a better treatment protocol, would it still happen to the same degree?
Fortunately, the group of people that end up on ventilators is not really that large, and I can imagine minor brain damage would still be preferable to death in many of those cases.
As a sibling commented, theeffects that won't start to manifest until a year or two has passed are more worrying. There's simply so much we don't know about this virus yet.
There are so many bodily issues that arose after my Epstein-Barr infection, it's not funny at all. I can absolutely lead a normal life and am active and athletic.
But things like autoimmune issues, persistent 15-year brain fog (I'd rather call it frosted glass layer) which randomly clears once a month to remind me how nice it is to be able to think straight, or full-body-numbing attacks in the middle of a gas station. The first 5 years after the disease I regularly felt like passing out. Later I just got dizzy and learned to control it using water and temperature changes (cold water in back of your neck!).
I still took on the anxiety story and did something against it. It helped me in many ways but not with post-viral syndrome. It's real and it sucks but it's not being taken seriously at all.
I am afraid, some COVID survivors are in for a new life which is different in just the right (but minor) ways to drive you insane. Body just doesn't feel the same as before.
Would you have pointers to how to nail this down? Introductory material or such?
I have to say I really feel your description of the anxiety cop-out. I literally had doctors shouting at me "you are not sick what are you doing here" at some point when I was sitting there already nearly crying because once more I was sitting there, mostly fine, when a few hours ago I was barely able to get up, let alone get on a bike to go to a doctor. And yes, "anxiety disorder" was diagnosed, but no treatment... because I guess the solution is just to "man up" right and stop being such a wussy. :(
Edit:
since others are sharing their experience of the cognitive impact, I'm gonna chime in here.
For me, the episodes came in two flavors:
1. I was feeling weak, and felt like falling. That was both in reality (I was having trouble staying upright and had to lean and hold onto everything and anything while standing/walking) and in my head. It wasn't so much that the world was spinning. It was more like sitting on a chair, rocking back and forth on the hind legs only. And then the moment when you realize you lost your balance and are going to fall over backward. That feeling.
2. I was also feeling weird but had no trouble with balance. However, the whole world suddenly seemed unreal and far away. Like seen through a bad CCTV screen.
Needless to say, both of those states, experienced at random times over months and months, with no explanation, and little support from doctors who were either uninterested or seemed to think I was just seeking attention, did indeed make me more anxious than I ever was.
Sjogrens, a cousin of lupus, has an insane amount of odd issues associated with it. POTS symptoms, lots of various organ involvement, brain fog, etc.
Especially the bit about doctors telling you that you’re ok but that you don't want to accept it. This sounds like hypochondria?
I can assure you that I have considered that. Still do. But ultimately, that would mean "learning" to not believe my own physical reality. I'm very much into intersubjectivity, but this is the one exception. That would be different if any of those doctors had actually seen me during an episode. The only time that happened however was when I was visiting friends. I had an episode while just hanging out there (holiday season stuff) and there happened to be a physician in the house when it hit. That guy never asked whether what I'm feeling was real. So it's that guy and me, vs a bunch of people who have never seen it happen.
I personally know two COVID survivors who are experiencing a barrage of various symptoms several months after they were told they were healthy, and new symptoms keep appearing. Both have been in contact with other survivors who've reported the same thing.
Now obviously this is just a single data point (or two depending on how you see it), and I am no medical professional, but I have no doubt what they're experiencing is real and a direct result of COVID. If we assume there are others, even if it is just a small percentage of the people who recover, then we're still going to end up with a shitload of people who will live with a multitude of issues that will make life very difficult. And the worst case is we don't know how much more is to come.
EDIT: Just because a disease makes you frustrated because you can't really do anything about it except empathize and listen, doesn't mean you can just slap the anxiety band-aid on it and call it a day.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
I've been experiencing something similar for the past 5 years: brain fog (frosted glass is a much better way of putting it.) and some short term memory issues. The doctors put me through a battery of tests to find...that they could find no reason for my ailment. Curious to know what if anything has helped you the most. The 'randomly clearing' brain fog for a day happens to me maybe once every 3 months and it's both a blessing and a curse.
In any case, i hope you feel better
+1
The last time I had a serious viral infection, I began having panic attacks and severe anxiety with mental fog, which didn’t go away when all the other symptoms did. My wife said I had “changed”.
When I tell doctors, they just kind of shrug. It sucks that it’s not taken seriously. I hope COVID-19 leads to more awareness of post-viral syndrome. Before Covid-19, we were all too cavalier about getting sick or getting other people sick.
I know it helps for people with autoimmune diseases anecdotally, but there's also some good scientific evidence for it.
It’s extremely easy to raise my O2 sats at altitude by conscious deep-breathing, but IME, it’s incredibly difficult to lower them near sea-level by any amount of conscious breathing changes. I’m curious to try the Wim-Hof methods on my pulse ox and I’ll do that, but I fully expect to see consistent 98-99% O2 sats here at 10 meters above sea level with anything other than changing the air composition to reduce partial pressure of O2.
But it doesn't explain all the issues away.
On a side note, maybe it's just me but I keep seeing comments that don't follow a "politically" accepted view point, being down vote like yours.
You're assuming the effect is both permanent and cumulative.
An analogous effect: Clinical depression is also known to lower IQ in a subset of sufferers (for some oddballs, it's actually their main symptom). But the effect is neither permanent, nor cumulative. When the depression lifts, so does IQ (usually with a bit of delay).
So I would surmise that the same may be true of IQ deficits caused by prolonged isolation.
"Consequently, the observation of post-infection deficits in the subgroup who were put on a ventilator was not surprising. Conversely, the deficits in cases who were not put on a ventilator, particularly those who remained at home, was unexpected."
This effect on those hospitalized is not the primary thrust of their paper. Instead it was the observed effects on those who were not hospitalized or had mild to no respiratory symptoms. They raise many possibilities about why this may be the case and only assert that this effect at least proceeds into the recovery phase. I did not read any claims about this being permanent, broadly speaking.
>bio-positive cases who reported being ill with no breathing difficulties showed a 0.32SD magnitude cognitive deficit.
My wife's hospital was full to the corridors with 'almost nobody's.
So this affects almost nobody then, and is probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization and ventilator organ damage, aside from corona.